


forget about this map

by the hyacinth girl (arguendo)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: M/M, Team Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-30
Updated: 2016-08-30
Packaged: 2018-08-11 23:57:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7912483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arguendo/pseuds/the%20hyacinth%20girl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which everyone has a crush on Space Dad, and some handle it better than others.</p>
            </blockquote>





	forget about this map

"This is dumb," Keith says.

From the middle of the room, Lance spins back: chin jutting, arms outflung and his scrubby hair all bristle. He looks like a dead cactus in a polo shirt. "It’s called team bonding, Keith!” He flips a hand. “I mean, hey, if you want Voltron’s bond to get weaker, that’s totally your call. Oh, _wait._ ”

Keith narrows his eyes, slouches deeper against the cool stretch of the sofa. "You want us to get in a circle and talk about the things we think are attractive about Shiro. I don't think that has too much to do with Voltron."

"Wait," Pidge says, "that's what this meeting’s about? You said you were thinking about helping me get supplies for that modified drone!"

Ignoring this, Lance squares his jaw and takes three brisk strides forward to jab at Keith’s nose. Denial’s shot him past his usual armory of coyote yelps and offended gestures straight to a wild-eyed red alert, strung him out on fifty separate hair-triggers. "Admit it,” he says. “you're just trying to get out of this because you're bad at _feelings_."

It’s not worth the fight. Keith looks at him. Then he braces one hand against the couch, another against Lance’s shoulder, and steers Lance out of the way as he gets to his feet.

" _All_ _right_." Hunk sighs like a sad foghorn. "C’mon, guys, let’s just get this over with. So: _order._ Order in the common room. This is the first meeting of—hey, right, are we calling this anything? I feel like we should have a name. Keith?” he adds, and Keith stops halfway to the door. “What do you think, bud?”

He wouldn’t stay for Lance or Pidge. But Hunk has an awful hangdog charm to him; when he’s unhappy, his whole body radiates drooping, wilting his cheek and chin and the puff of his belly. His disappointment is a grey storm through a wasteland, deep enough to drown houses and boys alike.

Keith jerks his head. He considers the wall then settles against it, a heel against the backboard. His eyes don’t come up from the floor. "I get the feeling this isn’t going to last long enough to need anything but an exit strategy."

"Hey, we've got a whole common cause going on. That makes us a movement," Hunk says, defensive. "Movements get names."

By the low table, Pidge snorts. "Do you name your bowel movements?"

"Actually, I _have_ been thinking that over," Lance says, overrunning Pidge. "But thanks to _somebody_ who can't get his cheers straight, I figured we'd be better off sticking with something simple—so!” The shadows tremble as he casts up an arm, sweeping over an invisible show. “Welcome to the Guys' Alliance About Advocating Youthful Straightness!"

A little silence shuffles in.

"Well, that sounds," Hunk says, shaping every syllable, "kinda fancy."

Pidge says, "Are you going to use an acronym for that, too?"

Lance opens his mouth.

"Just face it already,” Keith says, before anyone else starts. “There's a name for guys who like other guys."

This novel idea stops Lance in his tracks. He bristles up. “Oh come _on_. Like I'm the only one who's noticed that Shiro's really hot. You don’t have to _like guys_ to, you know, like a guy _._ ”

"Technically," Pidge says to the ceiling, “I don’t know if I even _like guys_.” She twitches two airquotes.

"You have eyes,” Lance says, aggrieved. “And you don't even have to _like_ them to notice that he's got a sixpack, and he's pretty tall, and when he seriously smiles, he kind of does that thing where his eyes crinkle up and he looks at you like you're the only thing in the world that matters—" He stops. "What?"

"Uh," Hunk says. "That youthful straightness is really working for you, bud."

A smack—Lance’s slugged him in the shoulder. "Anyway!” he says, all lordly to the backdrop of Hunk’s half-hearted whine. “This meeting—for an alliance we’re officially _not naming_ —is called to order. I told you guys how it happened to _me_. Now the rest of you get to 'fess up. Maybe one of us has dibs and we don’t even know it."

Keith stares at the ceiling. Pidge coughs into the hush like a rattling cup. 

Lance taps a boot. His eyes swivel an accusation from face to face.

Hunk shrugs. "All right, all right.” He trudges to his feet, seems to realize that he’s risen for no reason except to make a display of himself, and rubs his nape. “First I wanna say—I don’t actually know when it started? I just—“ He breathes. “You ever notice that he's always making sure that the rest of us are okay? There's all these missions, and he comes up with all the maneuvers mid-fight, but he still makes all this time for us when we’re down here. We still had forever to go before we even graduated—he’s been to space before this, and he _listens_ when we’re suggesting stuff, and sometimes even when I’m not, you know? I even told him the story about my mom trying to set up broadband in the mountains. It's not just about the team—I feel like he _knows_ me. It just kinda hit me one morning when I woke up, and—that was it."

Lance presses a fist to his chin. "Eh,” he says. “That’s pretty obviously not the start of a blooming romance. But I guess it’s not too bad. Pidge?"

Pidge huffs, curls her fingers around her elbows. "I like his voice," she mutters down in the collar of her sweater, to a lasting silence. "It's nice."

Lance scrunches up lips and nose and brows in one long pursing. "His voice."

"It's just—it’s warm.” An angry flush smudges her cheek. She whips her head up; her round glasses flare like the heart of a fire. “It doesn't even matter anyway, I don't want to talk about it!"

"Right," Lance says, staring. "Nice try, I guess. All right, Keith, you’re the last hold-out. Make it count.”

He wriggles his fingers. One brow twitches up and down. The hush drips with expectation.

Keith folds his arms. "I’m standing by what I said before. This is pointless.”

"No,” Lance says, with the kind of patience that’s only ever meant as an insult, “what's _pointless_ is you trying to hold out on your team."

"The team that’s supposed to be standing up against a huge host of alien forces?" Keith says, sharper. _Forget Hunk_ —he pitches to his feet; one look cuts from face to face like a scythe. "We're in the middle of a war. In case you haven't noticed, Zarkon's had ten thousand years to get a tactical advantage. We should be training with every opportunity that we have—not getting distracted."

Lance waves off the total domination of a whole galactic swathe with a flick. "Look,” he says. “ _Buddy_. If you don't think you've got the moves, you can just say so! No need to get all doom and gloom on us. We can just court Shiro without you."

Pidge says, “Is that another ‘plan’?”

“Hey! What’s with the airquotes around,” he mimes in echo, “ _plan_?”

“Well,” Pidge says, with the kind of crushing simplicity that would someday leave university lecturers broken and trailing behind her heels. “In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a reason nobody lets you plan anything.”

“ _Oh_ ,” Lance says, and his mouth screws into an ominous point. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize the castle landed in the _no-creativity_ zone _._ ”

But Hunk's frowning. "She's got a point. This could seriously cut into our training. I mean, we obviously need to get our heads in the game and find a solution to—" he gestures, sketching a vague shape in the air that could be anything from ‘Shiro’s abs’ to ‘a swarm of alien bees’, "Uh, getting distracted by Shiro. But, speaking as someone who witnessed the Great Cafeteria Wars in first year, your plans do get kinda intense."

"Ugh, fine. Forget calling dibs." Lance jabs once at each teammate. "One plan each. That goes for all of us. We all pitch in, we all get one shot at Shiro, and that's it. Game over. So if I don't land him, we can all go back to saving the galaxy in the most unlaid way possible."

Pidge straightens her glasses. "Who says you’d land him?"

It’s the wrong question. Lance tugs his jacket, flexing and preening. "I don't know if you've taken a good look at me lately—"

"Allura sure hasn't,” says Keith.

"Cheap shot!" Lance says, frothing up to outrage at once. "Look, it's not her fault, it's been _ten thousand years_. Maybe her hormones and everything are still asleep! And she's got nothing to do with Shiro anyway, and everybody knows my game's still on point—hey, look, are you in or not?"

"Whatever gets you to stop talking," Pidge says.

Hunk and Keith swap looks. Round and sharp, two pairs of shoulders shrug as one.

Lance claps once. "Ha! Best man wins. And by best man, I _obviously_ mean—"

"Uh," Hunk says. "Pidge is still right there."

"Come on, we're just including her because she's part of the team. Pidge's like _twelve_ , she doesn't actually stand a chance."

"Just for that," Pidge says, "I’m calling dibs on going third."

"You—" The revving trash talk session slams its brakes. Lance squints. "Hold on a sec, why third?"

Pidge bounces to her feet, adjusts her glasses, and smiles in a shadowy crook on her way to the door. "That's for me to know, and you to _lose_ to."

"Fine! Just for _that_ , I'm going… second!” Lance calls to her exiting back, “and we'll never even _get_ to third!"

Hunk taps his chin. "I don't know if it works like that. It doesn't seem completely fair." At Lance’s glower, he flings up his arms in alarm. "Don't look at me, you were the one who said one shot each!"

"So you mean even _after_ I land him, I still have to give everyone else a chance?"

Keith turns away; he clicks a bootheel before the door, which hisses open. "We didn't make the rules."

He crosses to the hall; between the doors easing together, Lance’s sulky muttering drifts after him. "You guys are _definitely_ not straight enough for this alliance."

# *

 

“Seriously?” he says, later. “Weren’t you guys supposed to, I don’t know, at least _try_ to win this?”

In the heart of the castle kitchens, Lance’s gearing up for a fresh tirade: knuckles propped at his hip, thin lip curled, chin rising and dipping like a vulture’s, a dough-smeared ladle like a scepter in his fist. The aproned king of all he sees: two pearled monitors streaming a constant inventory, a conveyor belt’s relentless winding of ingredients, sleek rows of sliding cupboards and hoses. 

But Keith turns away. Pidge, her mild face ever-schooled, seizes a haphazard, powdery handful from the nearest pot and showers Lance’s tray. Hunk only scruffs at his hair in passing as Lance yelps.

“C’mon, man,” he says as Lance fumbles to check his scalp for crumbs. “This is a totally-no-backseat-courting zone. You know the rules. If you’ve got something to say, you either wait your turn or take over early.”

"I don’t know,” Pidge chimes in, deadpan. She props an elbow against the counter. “It sounds more like he’s trying to get himself disqualified to me.”

It’s been three bustling days, brimming with battles and schemes. A low-key mission pulls them down to a tiny sweltering planet, the single satellite of a forlorn sun. They spend the day tromping a jungle, springy and teal and overrun, brushing through vines frail as roots, which sway and sigh and wind through their hair and arms and shoulders like thready, longing fingers. Hunk buzzes from pilot to pilot with an Altean scanning globe; together they register fruits shaped like firefly clusters, berries strung in pulpy chandeliers, gold and grey and strange purpling shades. As a second sun breaks the horizon, the team loads up with baskets, bear back a cornucopia’s worth of specimens to the castle for preservation and study and—in some cases (see, e.g.: Lance’s reddened mouth)—discreet sampling.

So far, Hunk’s turn is running busy.

Day four leaves them at loose ends. True to the pact, Hunk winds them down into the kitchens, where he props up his battered old smartphone on a counter and hits play. Turns out that he ran homesick for his first week at the Garrison and downloaded a heap of cooking videos to play after lights-out. This set spotlights some tiny kitchen where a warm-eyed poodle talks with a bureaucrat’s tinny, regal voice, and a chef’s hypercompetent hands sifts ingredients in the background. 

He sets them each to a task to the beat of the poodle’s booming Japanese: Keith chops and grinds whatever he’s given; Pidge’s set to stir and pour and supervise; Lance gets to roll and beat things off.

(“At least you get to do your specialty,” Keith says, and just misses taking an Altean egg beater to the mullet.)

They’re making bowls of some fancy fried meatball, crisped in batter and woven with sauce, the kind that twists on the tongue and warms as you swallow. They’re making bright airy griddlecakes, fried to a fluff with a green Altean oil that sweetens to something heavy like honey when it cools. They’re even making a pie: three different flavors spliced into a circle, whose seams join in the symbol for _peace_.

 _There’s this big overlap between engineering and cooking_ , Keith remembers, grinding the chandelier-berries into smears along the glass. It’s a memory that wears a familiar voice, echoes of a faraway summer trickling down his spine. But Hunk wears the idea like an old jacket, nodding and flicking knobs and switches, adjusting heat wherever it needs fixing, bustling and sure in every step.

Lance meanwhile’s fuming away over his mix. "Seriously, man," he bursts out. "With the three of us behind you, you could do anything! You've got a million opportunities, a whole _history_ _of romance_ to draw on. You’re really just gonna settle for cleaning the guy's lion and feeding him something?"

From the towering crystal stove, Hunk thumps his chest. "Hey, man. I'll fight you on that one. Feeding the brain _and_ the body is like the ultimate seduction."

"I think my brain just threw up a little in its mouth," Lance says.

This coming from the guy who's always first to the table on nights when Hunk’s taken the cooking shift from the kitchen automatons. "Watch your icing," Keith says aloud. He taps Lance’s bowl, and stares. "Or whatever that is."

"It's a fondant!" 

"It's _oozing_ ,” Pidge chimes, and her mouth rounds. At once she fits herself against Keith’s side to peer at the monstrosity crackling to life in the depths. "Guys, what’d we put in this? I think it might gaining actual sentience."

Hunk leans down, too: three pairs of eyes boggling over one rising trickle as it shudders and warps into blowsy form. "You think Shiro likes icing monsters?"

“It _is_ Shiro,” says Pidge. “I can’t think of the last time he didn’t like something that could talk and wasn’t attacking someone.”

“That doesn’t mean he’ll like just anything and anybody,” Lance argues. “You remember even one person who talked about hooking up with him back at the Garrison? Doesn’t that seem kind of weird for a guy who lets people fall asleep on him all the time?”

One time, Keith thinks: it was _once_. It hadn’t even been that comfortable: Shiro’s all hard planes and tension these days, his shoulder more bone than warmth. Keith’d woken after half an hour anyway.

“Maybe he just didn’t think of anyone like that at home,” Hunk says, while Pidge narrows her eyes.

Lance spreads his arms as if wash himself of the shameful ignorance of his fellow pilots. “Well, _sure_. Or maybe he’s taken one of those solemn oaths of celibacy until Earth colonizes at least three planets. He could be, like, a monk. A space monk, just with great—ow!”

Hooking one finger at the back of her sneaker, Pidge adjusts her shoe with the satisfaction of a successful defender. Begrudging, she tips her shaggy head up to think. “He does get up awfully early. I guess that’s kind of monk-like.”

Keith crosses his arms, leaving berries to bleed and ooze in the bowl. “Monks get up early for a reason,” he says. “That’s not a symptom; it’s a coincidence.”

“Yeah ... but I bet it makes you holier to think about all the sex you’re not having, though,” Lance says, scratching his chin as he scoots his bowl a counter’s length away from Pidge’s stealthy heels. “I'm starting to think it really _is_ the monk thing.”

“Or maybe he just got sick of people throwing themselves at him way back.” Hunk’s brows twitch, and he smoothes a knuckle over his chin. “You know what? Maybe we’re going over the top. Lance, Keith, why don’t we skip the tako—“

He’s already tugging at his apron, sweeping a row of utensils into one broad hand as he heads for the sink. Keith moves, but Lance’s quicker. The bowl’s rising lifeform’s shunted to a side as he crosses the floor to catches Hunk by a shoulder. "Hey,” he says, warmer than Keith’s ever heard him. “C’mon, man. You didn’t make me flatten all that dough to let it go here. We've got this. I mean,” he adds, in true form, “it is a pretty bad plan and there's no way it'd work on me in a million years—but Shiro's a different kind of guy. That’s the whole point. So relax, all right?”

The oven sparks and crackles; the boxy screens sing as a new window wheels into light.

Hunk breathes out. "Yeah,” he says, and tilts into Lance’s firming grip. The sling of his shoulders evens out. “Thanks, Lance."

"Sure.” Lance claps him once, steadying, then wheels. “Now tell me what to do with this fondant stuff. 'Cause if it comes after me in my sleep, my last act'll be to roll around on your bed.” He wriggles in spooky demonstration. “Just picture that. Icing goo and blood _all_ over your sheets. And son, let me tell you, that stuff won’t be coming out."

Hunk laughs, the tiniest huff. He bows his head as he shuffles to catch up to Lance’s sharp strides, and they’re off in their own cut of the world, talking about cake shapes and old video streams, a practiced back-and-forth where answers crack quicker than thought, and anything Lance says could almost be true. Keith turns away; a sharp pang burns beneath his ribs. At Hunk’s side, Lance looks as if he could tower over anything easy, like a boy born to adventure, greatness knitted into his marrows.

" _Hey_ ," Pidge says, louder, and Keith jerks. But she only tilts her chin to the oven’s vast display. "When do you think we should start putting these together these, anyway?” 

He heads over. Together their eyes wander over the crust settled in three pans—rising golden through the glass—and back to the poodle, frozen on a glassy screen by the wall: liquid eyes fixed and solemn, his pouf a-drooping, a cloud of scrawled subtitles misting his delicate paws.

“Let’s see what the dog has to say,” Keith says, and heads back to hit play.

# *

 

"So," Hunk says. “Not to toot my own horn, but I’m kinda starting to think I was right about the takoyaki.”

He drops his voice—but the hangar’s already caught his words, flung each syllable out to echo through the vast swoops and arches. Lance grimaces, Keith frowns; but the Black Lion looms on behind its projected barrier, glowing insurmountable and radiant.

By the heap of rags and polish, Pidge squares her shoulders and stares up. “I don’t know,” she says. “First law, remember? All that battery power can’t be coming out of nowhere. They must be tapping into the castle’s sources to recharge. If you just give me a few minutes with one of the panels, I can probably figure out how they’re linked up.”

“Wait,” Lance says. “Wait, hold on. Can we just stop and all acknowledge the fact that you’re talking about hacking into our _own defenses_ right now? We get attacked like every other week!”

“So we may as well find out what our weaknesses _are_ ,” Pidge starts, too sharp. Her next word cracks beneath the clickof a footstep.

Surprise flashes through them for one icy moment. Long enough for another thump, another, boots tapping down the stairs. “ _Move_ ,” Lance snaps, shoving at Pidge and Hunk, and together they go scrambling, dodging elbows and stray steps, tumbling into an old alcove: Lance crowding in first in triumph, Pidge stepping smartly behind him before Keith crams them deeper into the corner and Hunk brings up the tail.

“You’re crushing me!” Lance snips, indignant. He quits squirming just long enough to redirect his scowl. “Hold on! Hunk? What're you doing back here?"

“You guys,” Pidge hisses. A needling little elbow lashes out.

Caught, Hunk grunts. He shakes his head once, twice, and stays corked at the alcove’s narrow crack. "Nope. Nope, nope, I tried to try my best and now I'm out, he probably doesn't even like _guys_ , let alone kids. What’s that saying? I tried, and therefore nobody gets to criticize me—"

Lance’s too far to reach him—so it’s Keith who snags his shoulder this time, grips it like an anchor in shallowing waters. He hasn’t been thinking. A project’s no less stupid just because they’ve poured their hours into it, put their heads to the task like Shiro’s some kind of puzzle to crack and prize and hoard. Just because there’s an iced cake swaying over the common room table, rags dropped on the hangar floor with everything else they’d bundled to clean inside the cockpit. It’s almost dumber to think in retrospect, to remember all the times that Hunk’d quieted when Shiro talked, straightened his back and faced each lecture like a real soldier.

Shiro wouldn’t have forgotten a moment.

"Hunk," Keith says, low and rough. Hunk’s eyes waver on his, and his grip tightens, jerks him close. "Get over it. And get back in there."

One hand whips Hunk around, shoves him into the open. It’s too much, too hard—Hunk skids and wheels and goes stumbling out of sight. Past the corner, there’s a thud, body into body.

"Hunk,” Shiro says, warm and startled, after a moment. Nothing hits the floor, but Lance’s elbow scrapes along his ribs with deep meaning. “Are you okay?"

It doesn’t take an artist to sketch through the wavering silence: Hunk’s staring, he must be, tangled in the same daze that tends to hit people who take an unguarded moment under Shiro’s clear eyes. "I? Yeah!” He laughs once, then again; the sound rattles out of him like a loose nail in a can. “Yeah, I'm great. Hey, we haven't seen you in a while, started wondering what you were up to today!"

"Ships don’t steer themselves,” Shiro says; a softer shuffle comes, settling each of them on their feet. Likely he’s still got their fingers tangled, thumb resting light against the crest of Hunk’s palm, ready to dare a second catch. “After the last couple rounds, I thought I should check on Allura to see how things were going with the ship. 'We'?"

Despite his training—the hours spent with studied remarks about talking through his nerves (Pidge) and worsening impressions of Shiro (definitely not Keith)—Hunk’s stuttering his answers. Probably staring at his feet, too, while he scrubs his hair back into the old nesting mess. Keith spares a heartbeat or five to grind his forehead against the wall.

But Shiro says something, quick and easy, too low to catch, and the rest of their schooling goes out of the window. One beat, two. Hunk laughs again, and it’s coaxed and real this time, a brushfire sound that spreads belly-deep. Keith feels their movements, warm to his marrows: how Shiro will stoop with his next remark, bow their heads to the same height, lit with the same electric smile. 

Funny how he doesn’t have to look to know. 

Lance, on the other hand, is clearly trying to kickstart some kind of x-ray vision by any means. His brows drive together, squiggling black as he grunts and vibrates; he squints fit to pierce Pidge’s skull to the event of interest. No luck. "Are they flirting yet?" he hisses, all wafting breath and no mints.

"Not if you keep talking,” Pidge mutters, edging farther out. “Nobody could flirt to the sound of that."

"Says _you,_ " Lance retorts. He retreats, but not for long. After a moment, he squirms past Keith and winds up crammed against Pidge, forearm jamming shoulder, each scrabbling for a better angle to peer around the corner. “Oh, come on, Pidge, this is for the team!”

“No _,_ _you_ come on—“

Keith, left to the deepest part of the alcove, presses himself deeper into shadow. There’s no chance of leaving: the only viable exit’s up through the tunnel, in Shiro’s clearest line of sight. It doesn’t mean he has to listen to the whole conversation: the heady pulse of Shiro’s voice, how it rises and falls in tides; Hunk’s halting bursts of questions and half-felt jokes, working his way out of panic and into warmth. All he needs to do is stick to the list of approved topics: Voltron, cooking, and—

“Actually, yeah,” Hunk says, all wild-eyed fervor. “That’s kind of like what my mom used to say all the time, and boy, you should’ve seen her the one time when I was in sixth grade—“

“Oh. Okay, he’s about to tell Shiro the story about how he dislocated a hip,” Lance reports. His face withers. “He’s screwed.”

“—and the book just went on and on about this type of surgery called, uh, blepharoplasty? Which was actually kinda funny, looking back, because after that—“

“Or not, in this case,” Lance adds. “Man, he still has pictures of his hometown. Who even does that? Carries around pictures of their entire childhood on his phone _in space_?”

He doesn’t want an answer, and doesn’t need one. Keith knows how it’ll go: Hunk with both his thumbs heavy against the sliced steel, brows flicking, intent; Shiro’s human hand resting light against a shoulder blade as they study a pixelated gallery together, half-smiling in the old absent way, cheek close enough to brush cheek with a turn, a stray glance—

"Hey,” Shiro says. “Is that a purebred angora?"

Even in their stifling niche, the air spins. Keith frowns; outside, Hunk keeps paddling for some balance between romance and reality. "Uh, yeah,” he says, in the tones of a boy desperate for solid footing. “My mom runs the animal shelter back home, she sends me pictures of the cats in there like every other day."

A slight, pleased sound wafts back to them. In the pit of his belly, dread cracks its shell to seep cold through his veins. “Huh,” says Shiro, light and true, as an unnamable warning grits behind Keith’s teeth. “You got any more on there?”

Too late.

# *

 

Three hours later, Hunk’s fist thumps the doors to his room, and Hunk’s body staggers in after it: thud, thud, thud to the end.

On his bed, Lance bolts upright, dislodging Pidge, who sprawls over the blankets in a startled tangle of earphone wiring. "So?" he says, as Pidge scowls at his back. "Did you seal the deal?"

Hunk stares at him with the hollow gleam of a haunted man.

"That guy," he says, swaying, "really, _really_ knows his cats."

He plants face-first into the sheets.

# *

 

"All right!"

Turns out Lance is wrong again: Keith recognizes a rallying cry just fine. Apparently he’s also the only member sane enough to spot the flaws in making their common room— _literally_ a room where anyone gets to walk in—the meeting place for conspiring to take Shiro down with _feelings_.

" _So_ ," Lance goes on, pacing and oblivious to rampant mental slander, "Hunk's plan backfired because we didn't have enough information about what gets Shiro in the mood and what sends him into... a nosedive about cats.”

“He just kept going,” Hunk pipes up, mournful and a little muffled beneath his tomb of five enormous cushions. Propped beside his head, Pidge claps another pillow over his stomach in some show of absent alien sympathy. “Guys, he was so nice, and he asked about my mom, and he wouldn’t stop going back over the pictures. He wanted to double-check whether we could identify the other breeds in a Maine coon mix together over dinner. _For at least another two hours._ ”

Ignoring him, Lance rubs his palms together. “Keith! You've known him for a while, right? Help us out with a little tactical advantage already, bud. What does he like?"

What does Shiro like? It’s an open question, not worth the hot coil that knots in his belly. Remembering someone’s birthday, Keith wants to say, even if he’s never been told more than once. Having his head scratched when he’s just waking up. The story of Galileo’s finger. Lush, respectful biopics for scientists and astronauts, set to jaunty soundtracks. Nothing that they can scavenge out of an Altean castle’s ancient storage.

"Space," Keith says.

Lance flaps his dismissal. "Yeah, _obviously_ he likes space, the guy flew through the Garrison! Literally _and_ metaphorically. But, I mean, what else? There must be something that’s keeping him going out there."

Slowly Keith lifts his head, fixes his eyes on Lance, lets the weight of his answer sink onto those bony, scrunching shoulders. "Flight mechanics.”

Lance bites away an incredulous hiss. "And how long've you known this guy?"

 _Long enough to know._ How he’d had a phase at fifteen where he experimented with energy drinks while trying to pitch in at the local church, the garage, and the grocery at once. How, years ago, a bakery opened mere streets from Shiro’s house, kept by a sad-eyed apprentice and her master, a puff of a woman who reeked of starch and lipstick; Shiro lived on doughnuts and muffins for weeks as they struggled to find a niche in a town which kept more sand than citizens. Those late nights when his window burned with lights, studying, pacing behind the blinds. The way light fanned along his knuckles over a baseball, the reek of him coming back from a full day’s excavation by the dunes—

Enough to gather up stories, but not enough to share them. Keith shrugs. "A while."

"You're the worst,” Lance says, drawing himself up. “Have I mentioned that lately?"

"I’ll tell you when I get tired of hearing it."

Lance brushes this aside, two flicks and a shake of his narrow head. He strides to the door, the very picture of a manful protagonist in the throes of romance. "You know what?” he announces, and Keith’s fists twitch to fix his noble suffering. “Forget this grade-school flirting stuff. This calls for _real_ strategy."

# *

 

"Can we go over the plan again?" Hunk says, guilty as they trail down to the bay. "Just so that I know I'm not... hallucinating... like I really wish I was right now."

“Look,” Lance says, “it’s simple.” Like most things that come out of Lance’s mouth, this is a total filthy delusion. But Lance is at the top of his game when he’s trying to lead something, or thinks he is. His thin shoulders are squaring, nose and sallow jaw all jutted out, a scarecrow in shining armor against the backdrop of the command bay windows. “Shiro's meeting with Allura again today to go over the system diagnostics or something. We’ll head down. Then, as soon as they come out, we stage a fight. I’ll challenge you to a food fight to defend my honor. Obviously Keith and Pidge have to defect to you—“

“ _How_ is that obvious?” Keith demands.

Lance glowers, pursing up his mouth. “Because you’re traitors? That’s just how a good story goes, don’t mess with my flow. _Anyway_ , that’ll mean Shiro _has_ to play on my side to even the score. So: after a long, brutal shootout, Pidge’ll bring out… _the death-ray._ A food tube strapped to a pump-action barrel that just _showers_ the kitchen.” One arm sweeps in; he checks an invisible rifle and rattles with its shot: _blam blam blam!_ “Shiro’s about to dive, but you aim for me, and I take a shot of mashed space goo for him right in the chest. I fall, feeling pangs in my ribs, and tell him that my dying wish is to see the inside of his room. He takes me back to his quarters, nurses me back to health, and the rest,” he snaps his fingers and flashes finger-guns, “is _in the bag_.”

His arms drop to an awed silence. At least, Lance clearly expects it to be awe.

"Where… did you get that from?" Hunk says.

"I had three sisters and a dad who was really hoping for a fourth girl," Lance says. Remembering digs three fuming nailmarks into his cheek, drags them down; his eyes hang hollow as jack-o-lanterns in November. "My oldest sister got married with a playlist theme of songs from Julia Roberts movies. The whole family did Serial Saturdays together for _ten years_. Where do you _think_ I got this from.”

As ever, Pidge has her priorities in order. She clears her throat, once and again. “Okay. So what exactly did you want this death ray to look like.”

“Don’t know, don’t care. Basically just… take a hose full of space goo, make it look lethal and cool, and we’re good. Oh yeah,” Lance adds, thoughtful, “and do it in the next ten minutes? He’s basically been in there forever, so he’s probably going to be coming out soon, and we have to get down there before he opens the door.”

Pandemonium. 

“Ten _minutes_!” Pidge squawks; Hunk looks like he might duck back around a corner before he has to deal with any more conversations about cats. But never mind answers: Pidge takes a headlong dive for the nearest control board and fiddles her way down the keys, tapping and scrolling.

Keith slouches against the counter. “What exactly are you going to fight with him about?”

“I don’t know? We can think of something. Maybe he just shoved me in the halls.”

“Maybe _you_ shoved him,” Pidge says, from the middle of drumming between three projections at once. “Nobody’s going to believe that about Hunk.”

Three pairs of eyes flicker over. Hunk shifts on his feet, studies one shoulder and another. “What?”

“Yeah, that’s fair,” Lance says, begrudging. “Maybe I just found out he slept with my third sister?”

“How?” Keith gestures out of the window to blackness. “There’s no signal in _space_.”

“Oh, I’d like to see you come up with a better reason for somebody to attack me!”

Keith’s up to four before he even gets his mouth open—but Hunk cuts in. “Guys!” he says, an arm slashing between Keith’s cocked fists and Lance’s half-lunge over the railing. “Can you cool it before we blow this whole plan? Pidge, what’s the ETA?”

“Going as fast as I can!” says a pair of skinny legs sticking out beneath a dashboard. A sneaker kicks once, restless and furious in focus. “Faster if you guys don’t bug me!”

The quiet sweeps them, restless: a silence like sand, not snow. Cut from purpose, Hunk drifts from corner to corner; Pidge pops out from beneath the panel and arrows back to the board without a word to anyone; Lance watches the screens for any signs that anyone’s coming out on the lower floors, muttering practice openers under his breath. Keith slouches against the farthest wall and waits. Horses and soldiers throughout history taught themselves to sleep while standing; it seems so unfair to think that he can’t manage even five minutes’ worth of plotless quiet.

“Now this is quite a gathering! What are all you paladins paling about in here for, then?”

Every paladin springs up. A _thunk_ cracks the air as Pidge knocks her head against the counter, but she too stoops and sways to her feet. From the open door, Coran peers at each of them, twisting his mustache around one knobby finger.

“Coran! Hey!” There’s a yelp curling on the edges of Lance’s voice. “Did Allura call you out here to prepare for the next mission or something?”

“The Princess?” Coran says, and laughs. “Oh, no, no—she’s been down in there with Shiro for yoinks, hasn’t she? Said they weren’t to be disturbed.”

“Yoinks?” Hunk says, as Lance bounds over, all wringing hands and mounting hysteria.

“How long is a yoink?” His fingers claw empty space like he means to shake Coran, but thought better of it. “How many more yoinks are they going to need? Are they just _living_ in there now?”

“She found something a bit off with the displays,” Coran says, airy and lordlike, but fond even so for his sovereign sure in the mechanics of her throne. “Didn’t want to bother the rest of you with it! But it seemed important that someone look it over. So Shiro volunteered—said he’d be happy to go over the old records with her to see if he could sort it out. Think he just didn’t want her to be alone with it all, to be honest, what with the king…” 

The hush burns bright at the corners of his eyes, but Coran shakes it away.

“Well,” he says, “they’ve been in there all day, more or less. I’ve just joined up the old remote meal orders so that they wouldn’t have to come out to get food. It’ll pipe in any nourishment they ask for, in about the right shapes, ‘til they’re finished.” He taps his chin, oblivious to the way the paladins sag as one. “Could be quite a while. These displays weren’t easy to fix even back when we had reams of teams to set to it. Now, with just Princess Allura…”

Lance has had years up to his ears in obscure soap operas, Hunk’s shaky uncertainty, Pidge and Keith’s mouthing off. But this, it’s clear, is the last straw. He flings out his hands, shakes them like brooms as he stares at the ceiling. “ _Seriously_?”

Coran cocks his head. “You’re not waiting on the Princess, are you? Perhaps I can help you in the meantime!”

“Fifty-two,” Pidge says in her terse, coded way, out of nowhere. Her eyes never flinch from the latest screen: a relentless downpour of intricate calculations and whirling pearl-bright diagrams.

“No!” Lance says, too sharp, before the rest can get a word in. He claps a hand to either cheek and breathes. “I mean—no. We’ve got something to say to Shiro. That. Has to go only to Shiro.”

“Oh? Paladin business, is it?”

“Twenty-three… twenty- _one_.”

“Yeah! That’s totally what this is. Paladin,” he squeaks, then chokes down a swallow. “Business.”

Coran’s eye sweeps down the line: Pidge, hunched up and muttering numbers in sequences under her breath; Hunk tidying up the wires she’s left strewn to open air in her wake; Keith off to a side and Lance at the heart, coiffed and gesturing and red to his ears. “ _Oh_ ,” he says again, and draws out the breath with his smile. “So that’s the way of it, eh?”

“What,” Lance says, redder still. “What’s the way of it. What!”

“ _Fifteen_ …”

“A _fan_ club!” Coran winks in a manner that might have been _roguish_ back when cavemen roamed the earth. He pinches his mustache and coils it higher. “Couldn’t say I’d blame you all, really. We had a few of those back in my day. And Shiro does look quite handsome in his costume, doesn’t he! I was starting to think I was the only one who’d noticed. Oh! Must dash, there’s a few more check-ups that I’d like to make before Allura finishes up.”

He dashes away while they’re still gaping after him, three in a row with slack jaws and skewing eyes.

“Well,” Hunk says into the weak silence. “That was kinda. Educational. I guess it makes sense that even Coran’s not immune to the whole—”

But Pidge whirls, and the screen behind her’s shimmering and flaring, red and green and blue in leaping torrents. “Weren’t you guys _listening_? I told you: the castle’s sprinkler system can’t be triggered for individual sections and we’re right in the blast radius, everybody d—“

On cue, the ceiling rumbles and stirs and _whirs_ to slow squelching life. Hunk seizes Pidge as they duck. Keith dives and rolls. 

A bang rocks every panel; the world burns green, green, green.

Lance’s the first to come up from the miniature flood. Gasping, he shoves off Keith’s snaking arm, spits, and swivels a dark look from the heaps of goo out to the languid spiraling galaxies outside.

“All right,” he says, to the crew and the glass and maybe some obscure part of Heaven, too. As Keith pushes up, he scrubs his brow, dusts a thickening splatter from his shoulder. “I get it, Big Guy. I see how it’s gonna be. That’s _it_. Pidge?”

“Ugh,” says Pidge, and squelches her way to a seat.

“Yeah, save it," Lance says, stern. "Time to see you put your money where your mouth is.”

# *

 

Surprising nobody, Pidge’s money demands _robots_.

It takes three days to set up of ominous crashes and tinkering in the bowels of the castle, and then another week before they get the break to start. But it’s worth it. By the end of the first hour, they’ve lit all five stations in the lab, processors chiming and buzzing. Pidge’s quickest of them all: darting from a ring of sparking displays as they rattle and shrill their alien signals to a shelf of gleaming crystal motherboards to the controls at the hub as it throbs and glitters like a star’s raw heart. Whatever the dock’s supposed to do, Hunk’s been delegated to fix it—and he had the panel pried off in instants, plucking through wire after wire. Keith’s been to assigned a heap of bent shapes and piecery to fix—code, he suspects, for _only smash on command._

This leaves Lance in the corner, up to his elbows in the clustered wiring of something that looks very much to the untrained eye like a malevolent steel roomba.Bereft of an audience, he flops over his station. “Seriously,” he drawls, one cheek to a blinking light, “how do you guys _do_ this all day?” __

“You just had a break.” Pidge calls beneath the lowest shelf. She’s wiring a patchy, homemade board into the sockets; above, the screens quake and reel with bright symbols. “We get it, you’re not a geek. Stop whining and get back to work.”

Lance grumbles like a train on old tracks, but he says no more. Keith’s eyes flick down too; he focuses.

 _Fixing_ isn’t something that he’d choose to do for extended periods of time—but this, too, is something that he knows, a little. There’s a weird satisfaction to feeling out worked metal: measuring its fractures and bent corners, joining two jagged edges into a _snap_ , piecing together the shape it should have been with nothing more than the sinew and pull of his own movements.

But he’s always been good at this—has been since the first time he was asked: eight years old and set to fetch and carry as the mechanic’s new apprentice toiled relentlessly beneath a car. His eyelids drop. Just for a second, but summer’s there, a flare through the ship’s cool: salt, his grease-slicked hands, the piercing waft of lemongrass. The blocky denting weight of a car battery cradled in his arms, how he’d squirmed to bear upright. Its faint acidic reek. A boy’s laugh, ringing new delight, when he tottered the whole block without complaint, thumping the new battery down next to a flaking old sedan, as the stranger beneath pushed himself up and said—

The last pieces click. Keith looks down. It’s a moment before he recognizes the shape, what it means: whole.

“You’re set over here,” he calls to Pidge. “What’s next?”

She lifts her tufting head with the dazed, moony look of an overnight coder. “Huh. That was fast.”

Keith motions, dismissive. “Guess some things just come naturally.”

“Dude,” Lance pipes up, “now is the age when you _maybe_ want to stop bragging about being the fastest guy around.”

This pinches Pidge’s mouth; she weighs the spindling, intricate tool in her hands. Her eye snags on Keith’s, and together they give up the yearning vision of smacking Lance upside the head with it. “Hold on, though,” she says, beckoning Keith as she clambers to her feet. “There’s something I want to ask you.”

Lance cranes after them. “Do I get questions?” he calls.

“Only if holding something up gets too hard for you!”

"I don't see how this is going to come together into some big _seduction plan_ anyway,” Lance mutters to himself. He spins a flashing battery in its socket. “If you're hoping that you can build a robot who'll seduce Shiro for you, I've got some news for you, my man—"

At once, Pidge turns from the door. "You,” she says, mild as dusk, “have _got_ to stop calling everybody _my man_. I mean, maybe not everyone. But it’s kind of a dumb term for me. That,” she adds, tapping at the lantern-like switch Lance’s possibly about to juggle, “goes over there, by the way. Just hold onto it. Don’t plug anything in until I tell you.”

Sullen, Lance pokes his tongue out, but only once her back’s turned. “Yes, _ma’am._ Can I move?”

Pidge presses up her glasses with one finger. “No,” she says, serene in command, and leaves him grimacing as she palms the door open.

The hall stretches open for them, still and gleaming. Altean power radiates from every wall, a light without day. Too cold, its hush too deep. Keith folds his arms. “What?” he says.

Pidge looks at him for a while longer, owlish eyes and a sandy cloud of hair. Her mouth skews to a side; she tucks her thin hands behind her back. “You’re being weird.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Well,” she amends, addressing a pillar past Keith’s shoulder, “weird even for you. Something’s up. And I think you know it. Ever since Lance got started with this whole _plan_ , you’ve barely said anything.”

“I'm not really a talker,” Keith says.

“You talk _some_ ,” Pidge says, with a sidelong confidence borne from diligence, the scientific method, and being very fifteen. “And I’m pretty sure there’s a difference between not talking because you don’t have anything to say and not talking because you don’t have anything to say out loud. At least with you, there is.”

“Shouldn’t you be focusing on your part in the big plan?”

“This? Once I get it up and running, it’ll practically take care of itself. Do you even have ideas about your turn yet?”

Keith crooks a brow. “You mean I’ll still have a chance after you’re done? That’s kind of merciful.”

It comes out drier than he means, but Pidge only cocks her head. "My dad always said you have to play fair in love and war.” Behind moon-wide lenses, her eyes narrow; one brow twitches down. “You're not going to ask me if I'm okay with this, are you?"

Like a faulty screen, Keith’s expression blanks. “No?” he says, and hesitates. “Wouldn’t you just say it if you weren’t?”

" _Obviously_ ," Pidge drawls in Lance’s mincing tones, a mimicry so clear that it cracks the hard line of Keith’s mouth. She waves it off. "It’s just that—ever since I told everyone about me, it’s like something clicked. Hunk figures I’m the youngest _and_ a girl, so I need _special help_ for this stuff. And he ropes Lance into it whenever he can. And, to be honest, I think Allura's kind of getting sick of being the only girl on the ship, too. So it turns into this whole act about feelings whenever they think it’s supposed to come up. And it’s like, what if I don't care? What if I don’t think chasing guys matters?"

Keith shrugs. "Just walk away," he says. “They know where you live. They’ll find you if anything’s a big deal.”

" _You_ can get away with that. Not everybody does."

“When in doubt, I try walking faster.”

Pidge snorts. Her shoulders hunch, but only for a moment. The knots along her shoulder blades unravel; she lifts her head, grips the hem of her shirt, faces him as Keith used to face boys in the playground, in cornerstores and woods, the creaky narrow halls that veined the boys’ home, back in the bad old days. “I did wanna ask you, though,” she says, practiced down to the last syllable. “About Shiro, I mean. Is that okay?”

That’s not a total surprise, either.

“He used to volunteer near—where I lived,” Keith says, the easiest answer in his armory. “We ran into each other a lot. But I don’t know if I’m going to have anything useful.”

“No, not that stuff. You know how he—“ She stops. Behind her eyes Keith could almost imagine the host of explanations massing like angels, filtering and narrowing down to the sharp words that she needs. “I wouldn’t have stayed for just anyone,” Pidge says. “My dad, and Matt—they’re still _out_ there somewhere. And maybe I’m not the smartest person they could’ve picked up back home, but I’m pretty good. There’s at least seventeen different hub planets less than a day-long flight from here. Drop me off at any of them, and I could probably find my way in _somehow_. But after the Galrans broke in—seeing what we could do as Voltron, and how Shiro talked about it…”

She stops, but that doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t get better, Keith wants to say. His isn’t the kind of dream that takes people like a lightning strike. You’ll live through the first look. But there’s a second, a third, and when you tell him your secrets, he’ll look at you like there’s nothing else. It’s nobody’s fault. Anyone’d let a look like that nestle close beneath their ribs. Trail deeper into the stars, pick up a blade and fight in his name, cut burning galaxies apart, remake them to match the systems spinning in his earth-bound eyes.

“Yeah,” he says, like a match-flame trickling low. “I know.”

That’s the trick to Shiro: a look like his will tell you what he is, what he thinks you could be too. You’ll never want to prove him wrong.

A lock sways between her eyes: Pidge fiddles it through two fingers, studying him with bright, bright eyes. Her mouth crooks. “It really is a good thing that I’m not after him, huh?”

Keith stares. 

But the spindle in Pidge’s hand chirrups, once and twice, shrilling sweet. At once Pidge looks down, and her rounded, freckling face lights. “Well,” she says, wheeling away, “at least I got a drone-charging station out of this.”

“Wait, a what,” Keith says, but Pidge’s already forgotten him. She winds between the threaded bars, plucks three steely chords. A rumble crests up through the floor. The doors dim—and power crackles along the metal, spidering, livid, radiant.

A boom wracks the lab.

Pidge winces. The curl tumbles and she rucks it back again, squinting through her smile. Elsewhere, a howl fires up, rising and rising. Like a siren, or a coyote. Or maybe, just maybe, an angry paladin on fire. “It may still need a couple more adjustments,” she admits.

 _“Pidge!_ ”

The door hisses open and Lance comes stamping through, trailing smoke and crumbled shards. His jacket’s smudged with ash, his hair shocked up like a porcupine’s cut; his eyes jitter wild in their sockets. "I know you did that on purpose! This was supposed to be part of the whole official Plan to Investigate Shiro’s Sexuality! I can't believe you _tricked_ all of us."

"It's called team bonding," Pidge says, "remember?" She smiles, brilliant.

# *

 

After the riot of fondant and frills, after Pidge’s delicate wiring and the schemes run rampant, it’s a relief to do something simple.

Keith walks. Unseeing, he takes the stairs flight by flight. Along the smooth walls, the lights swell and wane. His feet wind into the right corridor without thought, crosses to the right door. He palms the heavy panel, and then Shiro’s sitting up from the floor. 

“Keith,” he says, and pushes himself to his feet as Keith steps inside, swipes the lock, waits through the lock-light flaring red. “Is something wrong?”

How many times has he asked, across the years? Polite at first, a careful boy measuring just the right distance—but gentling over time, warming. For a lurid moment, he remembers Shiro’s hand on his shoulder. Thumb light against the base of his throat. Calluses, the pads of his fingers in felt starry weights. Nothing to do with the here-and-now: Shiro’s brows still twisted, perplexed beneath the bunk’s hard pale lights, breaths coming heavy from his last crunch and sweat an obscene tracery along his collarbones.

"Let's just get this over with," he says.

It takes a second to filter. Shiro cocks his head. "Excuse me?"

Keith kicks a heel against the door, slouches down, and folds his arms.

True to habit, Shiro cracks first; he sighs and drops onto his cot. "So," he says, and it comes out only a little dry. "I'm guessing this is your turn."

"Unless Lance calls in the next five minutes to tell you he's got an emergency in his pants."

Shiro’s brows flick up; but he presses a hand over his face before the laugh breaks surface. Controlled, all his raw edges sanded neat. _They’ll make you different_ , he'd shouted to a star-eyed boy with his acceptance letter still clutched tight. But it’s strange to feel the proof, a gap in the conversation worked open through the earliest Garrison years, ground that’s never been regained. 

"No flowers, huh?" he says.

"Hunk would've probably brought you some. Maybe if you hadn't started talking about the best ways to care for angora fur and the studies that suggested cat purring has some kind of therapy value.”

Shiro thumbs the corner of a lip. "Life lesson," he says, very level, "it's really hard to get romantic if the other person won’t stop talking about cats."

“Yeah?” Keith says, and looks at him. "Does that mean it's my turn to get the lecture about how the Egyptians used to worship their pets?"

"Depends on what your plan is,” Shiro says. He rubs two fingers together in an idling, thoughtless gesture that makes Keith _ache_. “I wouldn't want to get in the way."

Keith swallows the sand on his tongue, grinds his eyes shut. "I didn't see the point,” he says. “Either you feel something or you don't. Even if I did come up with something, I wouldn’t be able to plan around that.”

Shiro laughs. The sound crackles along his nerves, sparks showering a single fuse. "You don't change."

"You weren't gone for that long.” It’s sharper than he means to be, rougher than he wants. He’s never been good at kindness.

But Shiro only bows his head to it, exhales; his metal hand flexes, smoothing a wrinkle from the sheet. "I know.” He rubs the back of his head as Keith’s fist knots in echo, grinding tight. “I should’ve told them upfront that I can’t. Honesty's the best policy, right?"

"Something like that," Keith says.

He pushes off the wall. At once, Shiro’s gaze snaps to him, doesn’t falter once as he trails step after step. "Keith," he says.

Roughened, Keith hears himself say: “You can’t tell me you didn’t see it coming.”

Closer, he can see the faint way Shiro presses down some instinctive answer, the pink flash of tongue over his dry lip. "I should have," he says, honest too. "But I let my guard down—I wasn't thinking. It's... been a while since I had to think about anything like that. And you're, all of you, doing a much better job than I would have. If I were seventeen and someone locked me onto a spaceship with just three other people for months with no time to myself, I'd probably have thrown myself headlong at the first person who looked at me cross-eyed."

"It hasn't been that long since you were seventeen."

"Eight years _is_ a long time," Shiro says. Against all reason, a smile flirts with the edge of his mouth, “I could swear I had a story about this kid who wound up with rocks stuffed up his nose just eight years ago.”

"I—" Keith flushes. _Methodical_ doesn’t live in the same country as _merciful_ , and though Shiro’s gentle, he’s not opposed to a signal now and then, beckoning back to a shared history and everything it means between them. That Keith was a knob-kneed ball of fists and silent tempests once upon a time, and Shiro his wry keeper, and nothing in all the years could have changed them.

What a story.

"Relax,” Shiro says, before Keith can shape a better answer. “Your body's just going through a phase where it's suddenly figured out that life's full of far more options than it ever thought possible. Just ride this out. Everyone'll get over it soon enough. You don’t have to be in a hurry."

But he reaches up as Keith tilts his head, a slight, thoughtless movement before he stops. It’s the way a boy stepping into a desert might reach for water, or a man hurtling through deep space trail fingers across a spray of galaxies through the glass. 

Pieces, years’ worth of jumbled pieces. And a _click_.

"Too bad," Keith says.

He pushes forward, but comes up against the bed too soon; his hand rumples sheeting where it plants and anchors, and he half-topples, knee banging a thigh as he fights his way upright with a bracing hand on his hip and shoulder. “Keith,” Shiro says, and it’s half-smoke and half-strangled, and he settles in the end with a thigh slid between Shiro’s knees.

Shiro’s eyes are dark as he remembers, starless and wide.

"They went easy on you," Keith blurts, nonsensical, because the truth means _everything_. "Hunk gave you the things he'd want someone to give him. Lance—I still don't know what he was doing. But I know all of them had to go slow because they didn't want to give you a chance to turn them down."

A thumb skims above his waistband, then jolts back to safety of cloth; still Shiro holds on. "But you're not good at slow."

"Fast’s the only one way to go." It comes out ragged already, too soon, heavy like it’s all the answer that’s left in him. "You taught me that."

Quick, quick—he tilts down before Shiro’s lifted his head, crushes their mouths together. It’s a stinging kiss, catching teeth and bruises, jarring fever and iron into his aching jaw. Keith jerks back, but Shiro’s leaning into him after all, mouth brushing mouth and thumb digging hard along his hip as he yields this time, mouth a familiar, open shape, coaxing deep and sweet.

“There,” Shiro says, and Keith blinks down, heavy-lashed, out of a daze. "Are you okay?"

"I—" Red steeps his cheekbones, flushing up to the tips of his ears and creeping down his throat. He licks his lip, tongues the jagged scrape, and grits his teeth. "Sorry."

"Hey,” Shiro taps his hip like a cue, a reminder of all the points where they’re still touching, “come on. Look at me. Everything’s fine, all right? You don’t have to apologize for—look, come here."

 _Here_ ’s a complicated place to pinpoint with Shiro’s palm curved against the point of his shoulder blade, cupping the jut of his hip through denim. They shift backwards together, clumsy in working motion, kicking sheets and a pillow, wind up tumbling just against the wall. Keith lands sprawled over his lap, a hand thudding to either side of his head, mouth scraping stubble and chin and the edge of a lip in the fall, punch-drunk on adrenaline and each finger spanning his back in warm possession, the felt shape of the first shuddering jerk between his thighs.

“Are _you_ okay?” he says, lower, and his mouth tilts up.

"I just," but the next word hitches as Keith shifts his weight close, as his heel jolts bedsprings and their hips drag together, grinding sparks, "don't want to give you the wrong idea."

His jacket’s trailing loose, and he shucks it in one fluid pull—kicks it to the floor. Fingers splay over Shiro’s chest, snags the stutter on the very tips. “Seems right to me,” Keith says.

He gets it right this time, and better than right. The spaces between them thin, airless and tightening through kiss after kiss. They don’t stop, not through the low gasps and thin murmurs, his fist knotted over Shiro’s shoulder like an anchor, Shiro’s careful hands framing his hips, and it’s thoughtless friction, the desperate jump of the knob in Shiro’s throat, the groan that wrenches out of him as Keith tilts into the easy heat of his mouth to suck at his lip, working open his buckle in hard tugs.

Shiro jerks his head first; the kiss splits, ragged and wet. “Think,” he says, “we might want to practice slowing down.”

“Right now.”

He doesn’t mean to lean into the question—but the press of Shiro’s hand against his chest brings him up short. “Okay,” Shiro says, “maybe—we should talk about this first.”

“Fine,” Keith says, and it’s only half-untrue with his fingers still hooked in Shiro’s belt. He tugs it loose, leaves the tongue of it to flap by a hip as he works his trousers open. “Tell me what you want.”

“Not,” Shiro starts. It takes two tries to get it out. “ _Not_ exactly what I meant. Come on—tell me you remember your high school health classes. We have to—“

He’s still talking, but through the words there come staggering two years of flaccid diagrams through Keith’s skull in a livid, unsexy conga line. For no reason at all, he remembers the pinpoint position of the inguinal canal in color, and the exact pitch of the droning, doe-eyed man who’d taught them to _always assert both your consent and your appreciation for sexual activities in a loud and positive manner—_

“Sometimes,” Keith says, “I could really hate you.”

In one push, he slides down Shiro’s body, from shoulders to navel. A breathy, startled sound puffs above his head. Shiro fumbles to sit straight, but Keith slides a hand beneath the cloth and along his stomach, feels the muscle tighten and jump beneath the stroke. The zipper comes undone and he's rolling a palm against the cotton, tidal and hot, biting down some flushed urge to move _faster_. “Are you… ticklish?”

“Not _badly_ ,” Shiro says, all scattered defenses. The springs shrill beneath his elbows. “You just surprised me. Keith—“

And they could circle their way into another conversation, but Keith too has priorities. “Remind me to test that later,” he says, and jerks the hem of his boxers down just enough to slide Shiro’s cock into his mouth.

Contrary to some half-dreamt hope—not to mention flashes of _other_ videos that Hunk’d wheeled off his phone screen in haste—nothing happens but the coarse, warping taste of salt. He bends—flicks his tongue over the head, the tender pulse of it, swallows thick as he works down by degrees, little by little, and feels the first bone-deep shiver break all of Shiro’s impossible stillness.

It’s slower than he would have guessed—but there’s no urgency in soundproofed quarters, with only the rising, wheeling stars outside the window to watch them. The hush draws out; the hum of faraway engines sinking deep into his bones, and none of it’s quiet enough to overrun the faint, stuttering breaths that Shiro makes, one after another; the shift of cloth on skin as he tangles fists into the bedding, as he tilts his head up into the shuddering. His jaw aches, but Keith keeps his head down, feels the jutting curve of his cockhead skid along the roof of his mouth and deeper, deeper—

“Wait,” Shiro says, absurdly panicked, and then “ _wait_ , Keith,” and then a hand’s scrabbling between Keith’s shoulderblades, hauling his shirt to pull him back.

He goes up with a bad grace even as Shiro splays open palms over the cant of his hips—straddles his waist, wraps his fingers around Shiro’s cock as their mouths skim in the ghost of a kiss.

“Come on,” Shiro breathes, but it’s hard to listen when his mouth shapes each word like an invitation—when he’s sprawled against the wall: shirt and trousers rumpled, skin flashed in barest glimpses and strips and curled with sweat, tight from his shoulders down his spine beneath Keith’s weight, cock still flushed and beading as he leans back, lip bitten red and eyes dark as open space. “You have to want something, too.”

 _Want something_ —as if it hadn’t been clear from the moment he’d locked the bunk door, closed the distance between them, jerked Shiro’s belt off his hips to curl his tongue over Shiro’s cock. Fury flares between his ribs, and Keith hooks a finger through Shiro’s belt loop and hauls.

“What I want,” he says, “is _you_.” It comes out sharp and stark as salt on his tongue, thicker as he wrenches and drags at Shiro’s trousers, baring the space-pale length of a hip, thin shadows tilting over the hipbone, the softer line of his inner thigh, and there’s something terrible in the sight: that he’s known Shiro for years but never had _this_. “I want,” he starts, but Shiro’s fist slides down his cock in a single even pull, and the rest of the words sleet through his teeth into a curse. “ _Ah._ Can you—“

“Hey,” Shiro says, husky and sure. He traces a metal, meaningless curl up the arch of Keith’s back, steadying him to kneel. In the thin light, time whittles down to faint touches: the palm against a rib, thumb skimming the dip of his spine before one finger presses deep into him.

Keith makes a short, hard noise. Shiro says, “Hey, easy,” as his finger crooks, stretches in a slight _thrust_ —and it feels exactly how you’d imagine a finger up your ass might feel. Keith bucks a little, knees scrabbling against the sheets with his forehead flush against Shiro’s, and tries to focus through the hazy stretching ache.

A thumb dents muscle just beneath the dip of his spine, nudging hard; their foreheads knock together, and Keith’s eyes snap open.

“That doesn’t do it for you, does it,” Shiro remarks, all wry lopsided grace despite the lush curve of his mouth, his cock still nestled slick against the folds of Keith’s shirt.

There’s a _yes_ , still, _yes, yes_ clustering thick behind his teeth. All the pieces he’d gathered to himself and kept over the years, the skimming touches along cheek and shoulder and wrist that he’d crammed into dreams overnight, the surge in the pit of his belly and the salt on his tongue. Some hurt’d be worth it, for him. 

Keith closes his eyes. “Not,” he says, “exactly.”

But Shiro only laughs, smoothes a kiss from his cheek up to his ear. “Told you,” he mumbles, fond and nonsensical. “There’s definitely some things we should’ve picked up in health class.”

“If you’re trying to ruin this—“

“Relax. We’ll practice on me—next time.”

 _Next_ time—but he’s got a hand stroking hot along Keith’s cock, working with the kind of unwavering attention that goes awful, feverish on a moment’s turn, rolling his hips into Keith’s fist with slow, obscene grace, and Keith’s dry-mouthed, fumbling through the next blind kiss.

They wind up jerking each other off in rough, uneven strokes, Keith’s weight shifting in restless tugs, shoulder to shoulder and hips pumping in urgent, tiny thrusts to Shiro’s building rhythm, and the hitching murmur that cracks in his throat.

“Keith,” he says. “Keith.”

It’s his name, just his name: helpless echoes and the flex of a familiar hand around his dick, a murmur that he couldn’t have dreamt even in the incalculable hours of the last empty year. Just Shiro’s mouth against his temple, the steady, incredulous beat of his heart and his grip working, _tightening_ —and Keith’s arching after all, grinding into the friction and desperate heat and the shock cracking through his eyelids, bright and blinding, as Shiro holds on.

# *

 

Then there’s the aftermath.

His hands first: nails and fingerprints and little bones, the spread of his palms sticking and flexing against a carrying heartbeat. Breath snagging breath, pouring out in lungfuls like sand. The reeking air all sweat and salt. Alien sunlight pooling through the peeled shutters, quicksilver along the floor, the bed’s cool frame, the snarled sheets. Gold where it smears the line of Shiro’s arm, dappling his hair in flashes. Shiro’s lip against his collarbone, lashes fluttering dusty against his bare shoulder. The slight tremor of a felt word, body to body.

They come apart slowly. Thighs shift beneath thighs, cooling as they drag, remembering how to separate. His grip untangles and they peel from each other in the hazy light. At the edge of the bed, Keith twitches a frown over his jeans, his smeared hands. Shiro passes him a towel. Light plays over the stretch of his shoulder as he leans over: three splotches gleaming on his space-pale skin. Crescents.

They dress in silence. 

"Keith."

At the door, Keith turns. Shiro’s standing, too—though he comes no closer, hasn’t bothered to slide his shirt back on. It doesn’t matter: he’s got the same summer-caught smile, wry and sun-drenched, and nothing else’s worth seeing. "I just want you to know—I’m not coming out of this with any expectations. There’s no pressure.”

It catches him in the quick. "Yeah," Keith says, all sharp. He can't help himself. "You, pressuring _me_. That's going to be a serious problem.”

"Everyone makes a mistake now and then," Shiro says. That comes out easy, too. "Or a learning experience. Or just a stage. Whatever you want—you deserve to have that. What I mean is, I shouldn’t have said that—about next times. I don’t want to get in your way.”

It’s a bandaging kind of speech, something that comes after the blood’s been drawn, the chains cut, _let’s just stop_ with all the letters spaced out. The kind of thing you say to someone after you’ve already made the decision. Forgiving. He could see it like that.

Keith says, "Do you really want to hear this?”

Simply, dark-eyed, Shiro says, “Tell me.”

It comes out of his mouth tender, frail sproutling words that should be pressed into clay pots and left to water and daylight. Sometimes it’s impossible to imagine that he and Shiro grew out of the same roots, that cluster of shacks and spindling towers on the brink of a wasteland. If they caged Keith in a cryogenic pod today, boiled his memories down to dust and crystals, all of him might come down to the lessons he took as a child from the withering rock and the endless horizon, the wash of desert tides at night: _burn what you don’t need. Stand apart until you can’t. Don’t stop._

But that’s never been Shiro.

Keith breathes in.

“Six years ago—in July.” A bleaching summer, haunted by the whine and perpetual drip of the lone air-conditioner up at the home. He’d come back dusk after dusk to find boys clamped along its vents, slouching until the flaking window groaned. Only Shiro took to the heat: fell asleep shirtless outside the garage time and again, wandered the town with his nose peeling until August, all wet dark hair, a hand perpetually hooked from his nape, and a crooked, hangdog grin.

“You told me we'd be getting a clear shot at the Perseids shower that year,” Keith says. “That it'd be the first time in three years we could really see them falling from where we were. So I got your address, I memorised the map—I crawled out of my window and walked the whole way so that I’d get to your house on time. I remember I thought that your car didn't look like it was supposed to. It was pretty beat-up. But the seats were warm, even at night, and it smelled like pine and engine oil. It took me a while to get used to—and then suddenly it fit. The car wasn't great, wasn't much—but you took care of it, and it did everything it could for you.

The whole ride, I couldn't stop thinking you couldn't want to be there. That you didn't really mean it when you said we should go together. But you just kept—talking to me. I told you I didn’t think I was ever going to bother driving anywhere, so you let me drive the last stretch. Just me and you and a dirt road in the dark. It’s probably the slowest I've ever gone."

Shiro says his name. 

"That's when I started," Keith says, throat dry. "Back when you got the telescope out of the trunk and you just went on and on about _space_." There, on a dune just out of town. The winds swept back to murmurs. The sure way his fingers wrapped Keith’s wrist to pass him the flashlight. The torch-heavy flicker of his eyes. His pleased voice like wings beating. Light turned silver across the span of his cheek and his broad knuckles and the finer hairs that downed his wrists. How it flickered as he worked, twisting and tilting to drive each screw into place. "How they'd just confirmed that black holes released electromagnetic radiation. The expeditions that were getting discussed and funded to the outer planets. How _much_ of it's still out there, unseen and unexplored. How you were going to come out of the Garrison flying, see it all up close. Just like that."

"I remember. You don't have to talk about this."

"No.” His hands twist into fists. It's important, of all things, to see this through. "I want to tell you. After the Kerberos expedition was lost, nothing seemed real. I never thought about saving you—I _knew_ you wouldn't just disappear. But I thought—when you came back, it'd be because you fought your way out to Earth again. I didn't think I could find you."

“Keith,” Shiro says, a helpless echo of himself, empty and brimming in the same heartbeat. "You're capable of a lot more than you know."

Keith digs his knuckles against his thighs. Reflex. "Yeah. You can say that. But I've seen capable people, and they all have one thing in common. They want the whole world. Or they want to explore all of space, just to know what's out there. Or maybe they just want to protect a couple of people. Something. I get that now, at least—a little better than I used to. But I don't want it like you do."

He looks at Shiro, clear-eyed.

"The truth is," Keith says. "I never wanted anything before you. And maybe I still don't have it right. Because I still don't want anything else."

But he knows, he knows. He’s telling the story wrong. This has never been about the early days—skinned knuckles, the waft of mosquito incense, tumbling and laughing and searching, two boys under the sun. Always it’s been this: the perplexed line between Shiro’s brows now, at odds against his scruffed streaky hair and hard jaw. Peeling away layers. To the boy under the calm, who _pchew-pchew-pchews_ his own laser sound effects, scopes out cat pictures, bows his head to delight in obscure space trivia. To the warmth of his fingertips wherever they’d land: a tap at his forehead, drawn shivering along his nape, hot where they’d cradled Keith’s hip as he’d murmured, groaned.

But that’s right and wrong too. Memory follows memory, and he’s got a world’s worth packed away. Shiro at twenty, the golden son. On leave and military in his stride, grinning as he shakes hands and takes every slap on the back, slumped over his astrophysics textbook by the window. Rattling off stories about space disasters: the crews that came together to shape those voyages, the slight, critical flaws that took them apart. Driving down to see an old rerun of _Hidden Figures_ in the tiny withered theatre on the main street in town. Resting the popcorn tub on Keith’s head when he began to drift.

Layers under layers. 

A hand closes firm around his wrist. “Hey,” Shiro says, and Keith looks up. “Still heading out?”

“Tell me,” Keith says. It’s the only thing he can say. “Tell me it wasn’t a bad idea.”

Shiro’s careful mouth creases at the corners. "I can't—lie to you, Keith. And I don’t want to. We're in the middle of a war. It’s… not our best timing. But soldiers aren’t machines. And,” he adds, “if we’re going to be fair, humanity’s come up with some worse ideas before us.”

“Now tell me you’re not talking about the Soybean transport.”

His smile flickers. “Soyuz 23,” Shiro says, mild and crisp as a mountain morning. “Now you really wouldn’t want to have been those guys—successful mission, but their engineers miscalculated its landing and dropped its cosmonauts in a Soviet lake, leaving teams to race against the clock before two people froze over inside. And even that wasn’t as bad as the Gemini 8. It couldn’t stabilize and kept its astronauts on the constant verge of blacking out in the middle of the mission—“

A breath curls at the back of his throat—breaks on a jumbled laugh. Just the way it used to in their glass-melt evenings in summer, listening to Shiro pore through pages like he meant to burn each to his mind. "That's not exactly the leader's speech," Keith says.

Back comes the smile: quicker, rueful. "I guess not, huh? Sorry."

"No," Keith says, sharper. He tugs at Shiro’s grip, less like he means to pull away and more to remind him that it’s there, linking. It’s a struggle to put together the right words. "I wasn’t asking for leading anyway.”

"You're still thinking."

"I just—" He stops. "This doesn't seem… real."

Shiro laughs, draws him forward, presses his forehead to Keith's. His eyes are dark, his pale fringed hair ghostly in the spacelight. "Real enough yet?"

Keith exhales.

It's worse, he wants to say. All your life you’ve been building yourself into something bigger, something that will be taken up and cast aside in its time. You told me you wanted to be a swordsman when you were eight. A kid in your neighborhood found a dead bird in her little plot and you washed her hands, helped her look up a requiem, read every word out loud. You’d read all the time: stellar and solar and galactic astronomy, cosmology and the history of astrometry when they’d ship the books out—old ink coming off on your fingertips like ash, mapping the untraveled galaxies like landmarks for places to see. You’re piecing yourself together to make something that won’t hold, won’t stand. What I want are all the pieces you keep leaving behind. Be here with me. Just be here.

Lower, he says: "Not yet."

Shiro curls an arm around him, steadying, just right. Keith presses his mouth to the roughened, stark corner between throat and shoulder, eyes gritting tight, shuddering beneath Shiro’s fist anchored at the small of his back.

"That's fine," he hears Shiro say in the quiet, a voice breaking at the end of the desert. "I'm not going anywhere.”

And he’s been waiting, waiting for this—truth is, even he doesn’t know how long.

# *

 


End file.
